IanBarrett

Thanks Hector for the explanation

With the traffic settling down now, I’m going to just let it go until the next time it happens.

I am convinced it is the Googlebot because 100’s of articles got 1 view which is very unusual for our site usually in a day there are max 80-100 articles read with 20 having large number reads 50 having 3-10 reads and the rest 1 – 3 views. so for 400+articles to have 1 view each is very unlikely and looks like a bot systematically visiting each article ( we have around 2500 articles in total so at around 400 per day that stacks up with the period of re-indexing)

Only a theory but traffic data seems to support it

Thanks again

Ian

Hi Hector

Thanks for your prompt response

The traffic discrepancy has finally started settling down again today so I suspect my theory about Google re-indexing all my articles that changed URL might be the reason ie the Google bot has finished re-indexing – Google Analytics would obviously filter out the activity of it’s own bots I guess hence the disparity between Popualr Posts and Google Analytics

Can you confirm whether Popular Posts registered bot traffic as human traffic?

I think it would be useful to understand this

If so is there a case for filtering out bot traffic from Popular Posts like Google Analytics or is this too complex? (Excuse my ignorance!!)

Many thanks

Ian